If you have not already and can do so, I highly recommend adding Dtrace to your C development toolkit. Dtrace, Valgrind, and GDB make rooting out C runtime issues a lot more pleasant and complement one another well.
Indeed. It's a pity DTrace is not available in Linux (there are two ports, none work for real work). It's also a pity DTrace in OS X is starting to bit rot.
A clean room reimplementation of Dtrace is on my list of ideal computing wants that will probably never happen.
Also on the list is everyone targeting the same hypervisor for device drivers (such as Xen) so that hardware support is excellent for all operating systems and all devices.
I would really, really like a clean room reimplementation of Hexray's IDA pro so that I can use it on OS and architecture, an LLVM front end for Plan 9/Inferno OS, a clean room reimplementation of ZFS, GNUstep to have at least a 1:1 implementation of Cocoa so that no matter the OS and architecture one can target that GUI kit and we have inter-application reuse of functionality through scripts like we have for CLI apps, and a clean room reimplementation of AutoCAD and Candence's Orcad.
And as someone who uses a CAS or equivalent environment a lot, I would really appreciate if an ecosytem such as julia, ipython, or octave would reach and exceed Mathematica and Matlab in ease of use, degree of combination and semantics possibilities, and power as well as efficacy.
I really would like to be able to use Plan 9/Inferno OS all the time but developer tools are not comparable to any BSD or Linux ecosystem and there is not a good GUI toolkit available (I would like GNUstep here is why I want the implementation to succeed).
People who can reverse engineer software and hardware is a very small population compared to the res of the dev population though and they are very likely to end up in a lawsuit if they try.
